It's December, and those of you who have been around for a while know what that means: the December Holiday Points Bonus!

All Dreamwidth Shop orders of paid time or points made (by a logged-in account) between now and midnight UTC on December 31 will get a 10% points bonus for you to save or spend in the future. For instance, if you buy a 12-month paid account (350 points), you'll get another 35 points once the order is complete for you to use on a future order.

This bonus only applies to orders of paid time or points -- bonus icons and rename tokens don't receive points bonuses. If you buy paid time or points for a friend, the bonus points will go to you, not to them.

The holiday points bonus is our way of saying "thank you" for continuing to support Dreamwidth. Our income comes entirely from you -- we have no advertising, no outside investors, and no venture capital, so you know that the decisions we make are always 100% in your best interest. Thank you to everyone who's bought paid time, extra services, or points this year. You make it possible for us to keep the site running for everyone, and we love you for it.

As 2015 draws to a close -- it's hard to believe we're finishing up our sixth year of Dreamwidth! -- we'd like to wish a very happy set of holidays to you, no matter what December holidays you celebrate. Here's to an awesome 2016.

(EDIT: Also, there was a brief problem with the promotion not properly adding the bonus points to your account -- that's been fixed, and I'm manually applying the bonus points for the accounts/orders that were affected.)

While I have you here, I'd also like to highlight some of the changes we've made over the last few code pushes in case you've missed them:

We've also had a request for another round of the Great Community Rec-O-Matic! For those who weren't around last time we did this: it's a great way to get recommendations for communities to participate in that you might enjoy.

Here's how it works:

* If you're looking for new communities to join, comment here with a list of some of your interests, and the kind of community you enjoy reading and participating in.

* Or, read through the other comments and see what things other people are listing. If you see someone you think would be a perfect match for a community you admin or participate in, comment back to them and point them at the community!

(Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or two, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw_news. This was posted at 3:45AM EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about delayed notifications until at least two hours after that.)

Hello, Dreamwidth! Greetings from Portland, where Dreamwidth has assembled for this year's Open Source Bridge. (Which remains my favorite conference ever for how wonderfully welcoming and diverse it is.)

That's it from us for another update! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion. (I'm still a lot behind on the suggestions queue, though, just as a warning.)

Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or two, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw_news. This was posted at 5:45PM PDT (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about delayed notifications until at least two hours after that.

Hello, Dreamwidth! Greetings from glorious Auckland, NZ, where we've been for this year's linux.conf.au. (It was a great conference! But then, it always is.) We decided to sneak in a code push while we were here, since we were in the same place and code pushes are always more fun when you can yell across the room when something breaks.

Happy Holidays and happy New Year if you happen to be in a place further ahead of the timeline than me (hello fu)! It's been a pretty awesome year over here at DW HQ, and now we're wrapping it up.

One thing we haven't done yet, though -- and totally remiss of us! -- is to talk about our end of the year giving. Most of you probably know that we typically make an end of year charitable donation of some kind.

In 2011, we supported the Ada Initiative.

In 2012, we split our donation between the Ada Initiative and then gave some to several different groups we appreciate: Doctors Without Borders, Heifer International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

In 2013, we didn't do an end-of-year gift to anyone, but we did a mid-year sponsorship of YAPC::NA 2013, a Perl conference we attended.

Here in 2014, I'm happy to say that we're back up to our old tricks. This year's end-of-year donation is one that's particularly important to us, so I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about what we're doing and why. But first -- what!

Well, let's talk briefly about the state of diversity in Open Source. It's pretty fucked up, historically; the participation rates of people who don't look like me is really bad for many reasons. One of the biggest ones -- and one that Dreamwidth cares a lot about -- is toxic/hostile environments.

One of the reasons we created Dreamwidth was because we believe that if you created an environment that encourages and welcomes participation by everybody, of all kinds of backgrounds, then you'd get exactly that -- diverse participation. The desire to build and create (and design and code!) is not limited to straight white cisgendered males and our project demonstrates that. In fact, I'm quite in the minority around here -- happily so!

Unfortunately, that's not true of the greater technology industry. Every company I've worked at is struggling to hire and retain people from non-traditional backgrounds. There are many facets to this problem, but a big part of it is a supply problem: there just aren't as many engineers who are women, or people of color, or trans, or.. etc!

Open source (and related: the maker movement) is a huge part of the supply side of my industry. People can learn about software, about building things in groups, and then turn that into a career. To do that, though, they have to be able to get into these projects and stay around. They have to be welcomed, they have to be encouraged.

The Stumptown Syndicate recognizes this, and their Open Source Bridge conference is a gathering of people who broadly care about the problem, who get together and say: you are welcome, you are wanted -- and you are not alone.

Building inclusive groups is a cause I support, and I'm really happy that Dreamwidth is in a position where we can fiscally support it, too. The world won't change for the better unless people make it happen.

Thanks for reading. :)

(Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or so after this post, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw_news. This was posted at 1345 PST: see in your time zone.)

We've got at least a few more weeks to go before our next code push -- a few of our ongoing projects are in the 'not quite finished yet' stage and we'd like to get those a bit more polished before our next release -- but I wanted to make a quick announcement anyway: our annual December Holiday Promotion will once again begin 1 December and last to 31 December.

During the month of December, all orders (made by a logged-in account) for paid time or Dreamwidth Points will receive a 10% points bonus, saveable and spendable for Dreamwidth services in the future.

To take advantage of the promotion, visit the Dreamwidth Shop during the month of December and buy paid time or Dreamwidth Points, for yourself or for a friend. For instance, if you buy a 12-month paid account (350 points), we'll give you 35 points to spend later, once you complete your order.

The bonus only applies to purchase of paid time or DW Points; rename tokens or bonus icons don't receive points bonuses, since the cost for those is intended to cover the cost of delivering that service. If you buy paid time or points for a friend, the points will be delivered to you, not them: the points go to the account that placed the order.

Thank you to all of you who've bought paid time, DW points, or extra services this year. You're what allows us to keep this place running: since we have no outside investors, haven't taken any venture capital, and don't accept advertising, our income comes entirely from you. So thank you for helping us to keep this grand adventure humming merrily along, happy December holidays no matter which ones you celebrate, and here's to an awesome 2015.

(Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or so after this post, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw_news. This was posted at 1715 EST (see in your time zone).)

This is a short update, because I'm sneaking it in under the wire before elbow surgery (which is scheduled for 24 hours or so from now, eep), so I may not be able to respond to all comments and I definitely won't be able to respond past tomorrow -- prognosis is anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks before I'll be typing regularly again, and dictation software doesn't work for me.

A reminder: Whenever a news post is posted, all notifications are delayed for a little while as the mail system sends out notifications of the announcement. Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or two. This was posted slightly before 0830 EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about missing notifications until at least 1030 EST.

Hello, Dreamwidth! I bring you news and glad tidings of the new stuff that came out of last night's code push.

(I also bring yet another apology for the length of time in between this news post and the last; my ongoing RSI issues have been so bad that I've had to continue sharply limiting my typing time. The "good" news is that I'll be going in for surgery, or at least a first round, next month, so with a little bit of luck I'll be able to get back in the game a bit better after some time for recovery.)

A reminder: Whenever a news post is posted, all notifications are delayed for a little while as the mail system sends out notifications of the announcement. Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour or two, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw_news. This was posted slightly before 0800 EST (see in your time zone). Please don't worry about missing notifications until at least 1000 EST.

hello, Dreamwidth! I apologize for not having posted a news post after our last code push -- I've been on exceptionally restricted typing due to multiple RSI issues (we're talking 'no more than an hour a day, no more than five minutes at a time') and my dictation software has been acting up as badly as my elbows. Since it's been a while since our last code push -- due partially to my sharply lowered availability and partially to us having spent the past few months primarily working on backend things and making some hardcore repayments on our technical debt -- I know that looks like we haven't been doing much. Rest assured, that's not the case!

Related to the above, I won't be able to reply to the news post comments the way I usually do -- misskat and kareila will be around later this morning to help out people who are having problems, but I do have to save my very limited typing time for handling things like payment questions and the like.

That's it from us for another update! As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

Comment notifications may be delayed for up to an hour, due to the high volume of notifications generated after an update is posted to dw_news. This was posted at 0500 EST (see in your time zone).

Hello, Dreamwidth! Last week, we attended YAPC, the annual conference put on by the Perl Foundation. We brought a group of our developers so they could both attend the conference and learn things, and also so they could represent Dreamwidth to the wider world. (Which they did! Awesomely!)

The conference itself was full of a number of interesting and varied talks, given by a bunch of incredibly smart people, and we learned a bunch (and found out about all kinds of useful things we can apply to Dreamwidth in the future). Aside from that, though, we had a great week, full of things like midnight hackathons, trips to see the actual servers that run Dreamwidth in person, people being voluntold to do things (that's a combination of "volunteer" and "told" that involves me pointing at someone and telling them "that's a great idea, why don't you do that"), and a whole host of teambuilding and other productive things. We've learned things, taught things, broke things, fixed things, and discovered just how many people you can pack into a hotel room and not want to kill each other later.

We'd like to say "thank you" to everybody who's paid for their accounts lately, since it's your support that allowed us to do this, and it's already paying off in bugfixes, new features, usability improvements, and loads of people who heard about Dreamwidth-the-open-source-project from us and are interested in coming to hack with us. So, let's go over some of the neat stuff we did!

(I also want to apologize in advance for any typos or weirdness in this news post, since I switched recently to dictating instead of typing, since my RSI problems just keep getting worse. Let me tell you, it may be easier than I thought it would be to make the transition, but that does not mean it's easy.)

Hello, Dreamwidth! This week we celebrate DW's fourth birthday (as of tomorrow) with a whole slew of new stuff to play with. It's been a wild ride these four years, and it's only getting more awesome as we go.

Hello, Dreamwidth! It is I, here to bring you the usual veritable rainbow of interesting news, exciting developments, and stupid-ass jokes that prove I should not be trusted with posting access to the journal that sends out newsletter notifications to tens of thousands of people. (With great power comes great ... oh, you know the saying.)

Hello, Dreamwidth! It has been a busy busy week in these parts, and we are here to bring you a collection of new and interesting things you can play with and information about the awesome things we've been up to.

Hello, Dreamwidth! Now that we have returned from tonight's maintenance (as I said on Twitter, we were all in the room where alierak and mark were doing the maintenance and we still kept trying to refresh things) and are reasonably convinced the site is not going to blow up any second (*knock wood*), I am pleased to announce that we have a lot of REALLY AWESOME THINGS to share with you.

This week we brought a number of our senior developers out here to Portland for OSCON, O'Reilly's annual conference about open source. (We were able to do this thanks to all y'all supporting us -- so thank you!) Not only has the conference let us attend a number of interesting sessions about technologies and standards that we're all super excited about applying to Dreamwidth, we've also taken the opportunity afforded by having so many of our people in the same space to get in some serious hack time on a lot of big projects we've all been working on.

Thanks to a lot of concentrated effort, we were able to get a few of them into "releasable" state -- as a first draft that we'll continue to refine and expand over time, of course, but we thought you'd like the chance to play with the first round. We'll be improving all of these things over time, as we also work to get some of the other long-term projects people have been hacking on this week released.

In the meantime ... well, I'll just go ahead and tell you about all the fun things we have in store.

Hello, Dreamwidth! I would like to apologize (again, ugh) for the length of time it's been since last we spoke. The past two and a half months have been pretty awful for me in terms of health stuff and I had to cut down to the absolute bare minimum in terms of "keeping the site running", which did not, unfortunately, include the block of time necessary to write a newsletter. (And when I did, either my laptop was in the shop, we were traveling, or my neighborhood had no power after the huge storm that tore through the East Coast a few days ago...)

That having been said, this place runs on the efforts of a bunch of people other than me (thankfully!) and just because I've been fairly out of commission does not mean that interesting things have not been happening. Behind the cut, a slew of things that are new and shiny, or at least just things you should probably know:

Hello, Dreamwidth! I'm eagerly watching the clock until the weekend getaway I have planned with my lovely wife -- and boy howdy do I need a vacation -- so in order to pass the time, I bring you an offering of hopefully-useful Dreamwidth information. Behind the cut:

Hello, Dreamwidth! As usual, I bring you apologies for the long gap since the last dw_news post (there is always something to prevent the good long chunk of time I need to write one, but I'm sick and tired of doing things that won't pan out for ages by now!) and a whole slew of interesting things to discuss and share.

You're probably aware of the ongoing protests against SOPA/PIPA, two laws that are being considered in the United States legislature that, I believe, will fundamentally harm the Internet as we know it. Today, we have joined the ongoing protests against these laws:

We have not completely blacked out the site. We debated it and while I believe it would provide a more accurate and stronger statement of protest, we decided not to because Dreamwidth is a platform that gives people a voice. We believe in our Guiding Principles and do not want to silence your voices, even if only temporarily.

While I won't say that we will never do that -- there certainly may come a time when it truly is the best way to protest -- we don't feel comfortable doing that right now. We'll see how the rest of the fight against SOPA/PIPA goes, though, and will keep everybody informed.

Thank you for using Dreamwidth. We truly wouldn't be anything without each of your contributions -- readers, writers, users, random passers-by, everything! I am truly honored to be working on a site like this.

Hello, Dreamwidth! We're ringing in 2012 with a collection of useful information and news from the DW head office (aka my house) and auxiliary offices (aka Mark's house and Fu's house). Behind the cut you will find information on:

* Development, Coding, and Styles* Community and Icon Importing* Site Growth and Stability* Invite Codes* SOPA* The Ada Initiative* Paid Accounts, PayPal, and DW Business* The Great Community Rec-O-Matic